Atlanta Activist Faces Felony for Tricking CBP Agents Into Wiping His Phone

A US citizen from Atlanta is currently facing a felony charge for an incident in January 2025, when he arrived to the US border via plane and tricked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents into wiping his phone.

The Incident: Samuel Tunick, an activist involved with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, was returning home from a vacation in the Dominican Republic on January 24, 2025, when CBP pulled him to the side for questioning. After he refused to cooperate verbally, they asked to search his Google Pixel phone using the GrapheneOS system. Tunick gave agents a so-called "duress password" that, once entered, erased his phone's contents.

The Charges: Tunick was charged under 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a) in November 2025, which prohibits the destruction of property during or after government seizures. Libertarian magazine Reason (Center bias) described the law as "rarely used," and The New York Times (Lean Left) described the indictment as "one of the earliest known instances of federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence with a program designed to wipe a device when a specific code is entered."

Recent Update: Tunick has pleaded not guilty. The story was covered by several outlets across the spectrum over the past week, beginning with The Guardian (Left), after a hearing was held last week in a federal court in Atlanta. ZeroHedge (Lean Right) said, "The Eleventh Circuit may be the government's biggest advantage" in prosecuting Tunick because in 2018 "it held that border agents need no suspicion of any kind to search a device" and that "in Atlanta, the defense has to attack the scope of the search rather than the absence of grounds for it." It added that the statute is "narrower than it looks" and that Section 2232(a), which deals with whether the search was lawful or not, "could put the conduct outside the statute altogether."

How The Media Covered It: Outlets across the spectrum that covered the story generally struck a critical tone toward CBP and federal prosecutors and questioned whether the search or prosecution is legal. Coverage came primarily from the left and center and trickled in day by day after the federal hearing. Most major mainstream news outlets did not cover the story as of July 30, though heavyweights like The New York Times, Newsweek (Center), and France24 did. The only outlet from the right AllSides found coverage from was ZeroHedge.

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